How to Speed Up Your Website
How to Speed Up Your Website
Website slowness kills. Your website may have stunning design, compelling content, and excellent products and services, but it may be too slow.
Why is Website Speed Important?
A slow site can harm your business in three ways.
- A site with poor speed drives users away. There are plenty of websites out there, so if yours doesn't meet their needs, they'll move on. People nowadays expect web pages to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% of users abandon websites that take longer than 3 seconds. Google discovered that 53% of mobile users abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
- A slow site hurts Google ranking. Google has used page speed as a ranking factor for desktop searches since 2010, and for mobile searches since July 2018. Your audience is less likely to find your site if it takes too long to load.
- A slow website will hurt your bottom line. A slow website will cost you visitors, leads, conversions, and sales. According to one study, a 1-second delay in loading time reduces page views and conversions by 11%. In ecommerce, dissatisfied customers are less likely to return to the same site. Slow websites lose potential revenue.
- How to Test Your Website's Speed
Now that you know the value of site speed, how do you measure it? Enter your site's URL to get scores for speed, optimization, and other factors, as well as suggestions for how to improve your site's speed.
- WebPageTest
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Pingdom Website Speed Test
- Google Test My Site
- GTmetrix
- Geek Flare Website Speed Test
Google recommends a maximum 3-second load time, but an analysis of almost 1 million sites found an average of 8.66 seconds for desktop and 22 seconds for mobile. Try these fixes if your site is slow.
4 Ways to Boost Your Website's Speed
- Image and text compression: Unnecessarily large file sizes are one of the main causes of slow site speed, so reduce file and image sizes before uploading them to your website. Google discovered that 25% of websites could save more than 250KB by compressing images and text, and 10% could save more than 1MB. Google says the most oversized web page elements are in retail, travel, and healthcare.
- Simplify page content: It is proven that the number of elements on a page affects the conversion rate. Google claims that as the number of page elements increases from 400 to 6,000, the conversion rate drops by 95%. That doesn't mean you have to strip your website down to its bare essentials.
- Examine plug-ins: Plug-ins are intended to enhance your website's functionality, so there's no need to remove them completely. But too many or outdated plug-ins can seriously slow down your site. Work with your website administrator to audit your site's plug-ins, update any that are still in use but have newer versions available, and remove any that you don't need.
- Examine your web host: One factor that may be slowing down your website isn't even related to it. Who hosts your site has a big impact on how fast it runs. Without exception, you should use a hosting company that offers fast technology, 24/7 monitoring and support, and excellent security.
